Photograph: Louis Freedberg/EdSource

Pine Valley Middle School in San Ramon announces opening of virtual school year on Aug. xiii.

Photo: Louis Freedberg/EdSource

Pine Valley Eye School in San Ramon announces opening of virtual school twelvemonth on Aug. 13.

Moving beyond pitched debates about whether kids should be in school or not, California schools are participating in a giant experiment never attempted in the state — or anywhere in the globe for that matter.

By Labor Day, nearly vi one thousand thousand public school children will be taking all their classes online, along with hundreds of thousands more in private and parochial schools.

So far, one-half of the state's thirty largest districts have started the school twelvemonth in altitude learning fashion, and the rest will practise so in the next ii weeks. Yet to be revealed are the extent to which teachers are prepared to deliver instruction remotely, whether they volition be able to hold students' attending for weeks or months, and how much students will larn compared to being in a regular classroom. Besides at effect is whether students who are already struggling will autumn further behind, and whether achievement gaps volition widen.

Schools are opening fifty-fifty as the state scrambles to come upwardly with devices and ensure internet connectivity to ensure that all students can participate in remote learning. An estimated 700,000 students, disproportionately from depression-income families, still need devices like laptops or Chromebooks, and 300,000 lack internet connectivity to ensure full participation in distance learning.

"Every bit Californians, we accept a shared commitment to ensure every student has access to the basic tools needed to connect to their learning, succeed in today's world, and pursue their dreams," said Country Superintendent Of Public Education Tony Thurmond on Aug. 5 in announcing a partnership with Apple and T-Mobile to aid close this digital divide.

What's unknown is how long this full-time online regimen will terminal — a few weeks, months, the unabridged schoolhouse year, or fifty-fifty part or all of the adjacent schoolhouse twelvemonth. Another unknown is how many districts will apply for, and receive, waivers to teach K-6 students in person, or bring dorsum pocket-size groups of special ed students and others with "acute needs," as permitted by state law.

Ideally, teachers will have gotten better prepared over the summer, and come to school with new distance learning skills under their belts.

"You've got to be certain that teachers know how to teach effectively online, that they accept the materials and the supports that are needed to do that in a very effective way," said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education, said in an NBC News podcast terminal week.

However, since the hurried closure of school last twelvemonth bound, teachers have had to rely on a patchwork of offerings from districts, schools of educational activity and other organizations similar the California Schoolhouse Boards Association.

In some cases, offer professional development on distance learning has been delayed by lengthy negotiations with teachers unions in several large districts effectually but setting the bones atmospheric condition for how remote classes will be run.

One obstacle was that until Gov. Newsom issued new state guidance in mid-July requiring distance learning for almost California school districts, many were still planning on in-school instruction in some grade or some other. That meant that, until most a month ago, districts were planning for multiple modes of teaching, including focusing more on how to teach kids safely in school, leaving less fourth dimension to program for distance learning.

California's decision to open virtually of its schools only for distance learning at present seems prescient in lite of new reports showing a startling increment in the number of coronavirus infections amid children and teenagers, as well as the quarantining of thousands of students and staff inside days of children returning to schoolhouse in Georgia and other states. Both developments represent potent rebuttals to President Trump and others urging that schools open up for in-person teaching regardless of the health risks.

California's plough to full-time distance learning is feasible but because of technological tools like Zoom, Google Classroom, Google Hangout, Flipgrid, Seesaw and many others that take emerged in the last half dozen years or and so. That's in addition to the availability of high-quality online material offered by the non-profit Khan University and other more commercial companies similar Newsela, Raz-Kids and Lexia.

In prior pandemics, offering educational activity to students at home on this calibration would take been impossible. In the 1918 flu epidemic, not all districts closed. Those that did, like Los Angeles Unified, did the best they could past setting up a system based on the correspondence instruction model, requiring students to post in homework assignments.

Now educators in Fifty.A. and elsewhere have far more effective tools at their disposal. In fact, i claiming is that there are so many altitude learning materials online that teachers can exist easily overwhelmed before they become started.

Casting a shadow over this fall'southward distance learning experiment is California's experience in the spring.

In a non-representative EdSource survey of mostly smaller school districts in California, about i third of simply over 100 superintendents rated their distance learning program last jump as unsatisfactory. L.A. Unified, one of the few districts in the state with a robust research adequacy, carefully tracked student online participation in the leap, and plant relatively low participation of near 50,000 Blackness, Latino, English learner and low-income students. The district warned that this could result in "lost learning which could have students years to recoup."

The researchers cautioned that these results shouldn't be used to approximate the overall value of distance learning, or what students could expect this fall. That'south because in the bound teachers were not required to collaborate with their students each mean solar day, track daily participation, or to grade students beyond application credit or no credit. This fall, however, they will be required to do then. Districts must also develop a weekly record for each educatee that documents how much didactics they received, and in what format.

Land police force requires that distance learning provide "a level of service and schoolhouse connectedness" similar to what students might feel if they were physically in school.

Whether that will happen is however far from certain.

To get up to speed, teachers have turned in large numbers to online webinars and courses, such equally the two-day "online teaching academy" organized by San Jose State University's Connie L. Lurie College of Education. Nearly 2,000 teachers signed up for one or more of the 23 sessions on topics such as "rethinking assessment for the Google generation," and "leveraging YouTube for distance learning."

Some districts likewise offered professional person development programs over the summer. Stockton Unified acting superintendent Brian Biederman said his approximately 40,000-student district had "a heavy professional evolution calendar to get teachers comfortable with technology." Participation was voluntary, but teachers were paid. Over half of the district's teachers participated, he said.

At the much smaller Taft Union Loftier in Kern Higher, which enrolls i,500 students, teachers had the selection to join a four-day session in early August with trainers from Taft Higher, the local community college. For five hours a twenty-four hours, teachers learned how to navigate platforms like Zoom and Canvas.

Compared to when schools closed abruptly in March, teachers are now much better-prepared, said superintendent Blanca Cavazos. "What nosotros did under crisis pedagogy in the spring and what we're going to do with distance learning now are very different," said Cavazos, whose district opened for didactics on Thursday.

For the past two weeks, the California Teachers Association hosted a two-week-long "distance learning support" serial of webinars for an hr each afternoon. Topics ranged from the basics of "organizing your virtual classroom" to "culturally relevant pedagogy," "peer and students collaboration," and "special education and homeless students support."

On the first solar day of the CTA's online class solitary just over chiliad teachers joined in. Their questions, directed at Angela Young, a kindergarten teacher, showed how far some yet had to go earlier their schools opened. "Where are you getting your materials?" was one. "If you have 30 students, how do you manage students all at in one case?" and "do you have a room in your business firm fix upwards like a classroom?" were others.

Significantly, Young has honed her online instructional skills non in a regular public school, merely at the California Virtual Academies, an online charter school where she currently teaches.

She explained that teachers have to exist aware that their online audience volition extend well across but their students. "You'll have grandma, you'll have mom, yous'll accept brothers and sisters, you'll have pets." That's because students' computers may exist in their living rooms, bedrooms or even bathrooms. "I've seen the gamut," Young said.

Information technology's clear that distance learning is a way of instruction that few of the key players in the teaching enterprise — parents, teachers, students, schoolhouse administrators or politicians — would accept voluntarily chosen in the absence of the pandemic. At present it will be upwards to anybody to seize the tools that at their disposal, and make it piece of work as all-time they can.

Distance learning has the potential "to be as good or even more effective than in-person pedagogy," at least for older students who are already spending large amounts of fourth dimension online, country board president Darling-Hammond said on the NBC podcast. "But that requires that you lot have a really thoughtful curriculum, that kids are using interactive multimedia materials, doing small-scale group work in a Zoom breakout room, getting information from the instructor and doing projects that engage them in using technology in heady and interesting means."

EdSource reporter Betty Marquez Rosales contributed to this report.

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